Marketing Metrics – Where to Begin?

July 06th, 2017

By Maria Meijer

If my scientific training has taught me anything, it’s if you want to measure something – you need to start with a baseline.

Most of the B2B clients that we work with already have some foundational marketing collateral in place – logo, website, product sheets – but they know that something isn’t quite resonating with their customers to make them take action.

The first thing we do when working with a new client is to provide a Marketing Audit of all their existing materials. Because GridStone is focused on companies with technical products and services, we not only evaluate strategy and branding, but also content.

Consistency is King

The overarching goal of the evaluation is to determine whether your brand and messaging is consistent. The process involves reviewing any and all customer-facing collateral. This may require some thought around what this includes – proposals/quotes through to on-site operating procedures.

Once you have a clear picture of your baseline current state, the steps required to move towards more cohesive, directed marketing become much clearer. Not only do the steps become clear, but the best path forward as well. Taking a phased approach to updating branding and content has worked well for our clients.

Let the Strategy Begin

Once you’ve cleaned house and your branding and messaging ducks are in a row, you can use these materials to build a Marketing Strategy tailored to your customers to drive them to take action.

This is truly a case-by-case analysis for GridStone as many companies in the B2B space have a small customer set – in one case we worked with a Calgary-based organization that had customers around the world but because they were so niche – the number was only about 500. We could figure out exactly who they were, where they worked and what messages were of interest to them.

This information tells us the most applicable tactics and what content to use to best target your customer base.

For Good Measure

In the end, marketing is a business function and should be tracked accordingly. Examples of tracking include website and social media analytics, lead-generation to sales. All need to be looked at from a holistic perspective to determine what’s working and what’s not.

Because marketing is a long-term investment, we review metrics and tweak tactics and messaging to ensure we have the best program with the best results for our clients.